Peo­ple with media jobs in mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies who fre­quent these pages will prob­a­bly feel that it was only five min­utes ago that we were report­ing a big new update from Blip­par, the light­ning fast aug­ment­ed real­i­ty mobile adver­tis­ing plat­form based in New York and Lon­don. Back in Sep­tem­ber last year, it tweaked its image recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy to deliv­er social shar­ing and faster AR con­tent (it unlocks inter­ac­tive con­tent when users scan brand logos or the uni­ver­sal “Blipp” sym­bol with their mobile devices).

Wear­ables: mobile advertising’s new frontier

And now it’s mov­ing into the next fron­tier of mobile adver­tis­ing by bring­ing its plat­form to wear­ables. It has recent­ly intro­duced its excel­lent image recog­ni­tion tech to Google Glass, the first time that this has ever been done. Inte­grat­ed onto Glass, it rec­og­nizes images, prod­ucts and even human faces.

Those who have fol­lowed the for­tunes of this inno­v­a­tive mobile adver­tis­ing start­up will prob­a­bly be aware that Blip­par is now used by a great many peo­ple world­wide (at the last count a cou­ple of months ago, there were 5 mil­lion of them – and count­ing). Avail­able on Android, iOS, Win­dows Phone and Black­Ber­ry devices, its tech­nol­o­gy is now extend­ing its reach to wear­ables with the Glass development.

And that tech­nol­o­gy is some­thing else: it’s no mere QR code scan­ner. It rec­og­nizes and process­es unique images, deliv­er­ing engag­ing con­tent unique­ly based on them.

The next big thing? 

OK, Google Glass as yet has a few thou­sand users at most. But Blippar’s founder, Rish Mitra, thinks it has real poten­tial. He said:

“Glass today can be likened to what mobile phones were in the ear­ly nineties. We at Blip­par antic­i­pate that if Glass reach­es a cou­ple mil­lion users in its first year of launch, it will be a good busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ty for us to devel­op in the space. We are invest­ing in the poten­tial of Glass.”

The wiz­ardry involved in bring­ing image recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy, which is noto­ri­ous­ly hard­ware inten­sive, to wear­ables is no mean fete: every­thing has to be more com­pact, lean­er and lighter. But Blip­par seems to have pulled that rab­bit out of the hat.

Expect it to become com­mer­cial­ly avail­able soon.